Monday, December 17, 2018

The Zentangle Spinner project (My version)


A recent series of videos and instructions came out for the Zentangle® followers of CZT leaders Rick and Marie.  They do a 12 days of Christmas special every year with some sort of inspirational ideas.  They are now publishing what they call "project packs" which is a nice little "kit" you can buy with all the materials need to complete a project.  

I think the kits cost about $25 a piece.  Granted the materials are lovely...using the beautiful Italian paper and Sakura pens and I think the pack I am telling you about today also includes some colored pencils.  And a spinner.  

The idea of this Zentangle spinner is that you put your own favorite tangles in the blank boxes or quadrants and then how you use it is to spin it when you are ready to make a tile or project of your own and the tangle you use must be chosen by the "luck of the draw" so to speak.  Allowing you not to fuss over deciding what tangle to use eliminates one of the side issues of making a tile.   In other words just for fun.  

The project was video taped and I believe is available to anyone who wants to watch the tangles being drawn so beautifully!  Just go to YouTube and put in Zentangle Project Pack.  This is #4.  And there are 12 videos.  But I digress.

So this is MY version of the project pack and it cost about 50 cents.
Done on a piece of fairly good cold press watercolor paper (Canson recommended), the spinners are inexpensively purchased at Amazon.  My version is smaller than the version you would buy at Zentangle (circle is a 7" diameter).  But it still gives you a choice of 30 different tangles to choose from.  I simply used a plate for the outside circle and a compass to draw the others.  

The purchased project as shown in the videos had numbers and letters around the outside that to me made very little sense to me overall.  If I was going to use this with my students I wanted something quite practical.  So I wanted a way for them to identify the tangle's name so they could go and find the "step outs" for that tangle if they needed to.  So I typed the names the tangles giving them each a number and put that number next to the quadrant in which they are drawn.  

This whole thing could be put on a printer and copied for students to just glue down onto a paper if that is what I decided to do...or I could give students a blank copy and get them started on one of their own.  It was a fun project and didn't take all that long to do.





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